Tag: Google

Pointless, Impotent Power

Consumption in absentia. Like having a hit song you recorded decades ago still occupy the mind of a Chinese sweatshop worker you’ll never meet. It’s power, but a kind of pointless, impotent power.

Palahniuk, C. (2011). Damned. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

If You Don’t Like It…

Several former Weinstein employees told me that the company’s human-resources department was utterly ineffective; one female executive described it as “a place where you went to when you didn’t want anything to get done. That was common knowledge across the board. Because everything funneled back to Harvey.” She described the department’s typical response to allegations of misconduct as “This is his company. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Fragility

Whatever her intent, The Beguiled is a curious reckoning of the myths of white womanhood — how they use fragility as a shield for deviousness and insulate themselves from the horrors of a world that they too are responsible for.

Indifferent to Getting Rich

By all accounts, these programmers turned entrepreneurs believed their lofty words and were at first indifferent to getting rich from their ideas. A 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then computer-science graduate students at Stanford, stressed the social benefits of their new search engine, Google, which would be open to the scrutiny of other researchers and wouldn’t be advertising-driven. The public needed to be assured that searches were uncorrupted, that no one had put his finger on the scale for business reasons.

One-Line Dismissal

That’s why I find it frankly cringe-inducing when someone sits back with a smug grin on their mug after uttering a lazy one-line dismissal to a thousand-word review, not to mention the site in general. Whoever does that – you didn’t just “win” at anything. Quite the contrary.

Done Before and Better

Imagine that everything even remotely clever in them has been done before and better by someone else. Imagine that each one flaunts the kind of “research” that can be achieved by leafing through a trade magazine for 30 minutes and is riddled with grating errors. Imagine that these books traffic in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine-Inch Nails.

In Command Now

His rambling, awkward, cliché-ridden eulogy/I-am-in-command-now-speech tells us right away this guy isn’t qualified to command a beer run, which makes one wonder exactly why he was even given the XO post in the first place.

Then Sir Topham Hatt, the railway director, who is also known as the Fat Controller, arrives on the scene. (He looks like Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags but with eyes that have almost surely witnessed murder.)